Joseph Campbell, (born March 26, 1904, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 30, 1987, Honolulu, Hawaii) prolific American author and editor whose works on comparative mythology examined the universal functions of myth in various human cultures and mythic figures in a wide range of literatures.

Life

Campbell attributed what he called his preoccupation with mythology to childhood trips to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West exhibition and to visits to the American Museum of Natural History, where he was fascinated by artifacts of Native Americans. Raised as a Roman Catholic, he saw parallels between seemingly unique Christian beliefs, such as the Virgin Birth of Jesus, and the religious beliefs of Native Americans. Because the similarities between them seemed too close to be coincidental, he concluded that the beliefs could not be the result of independent historical development. That early conclusion implanted in Campbell his fundamental convictions: that similarities rather than differences between myths count most, that mythologies worldwide are related, that myth must be interpreted nonhistorically and nonliterally, and that religions systematically misinterpret their own myths.

Soon after he returned home, Campbell left the doctoral program at Columbia because his advisers would not support his plans to study medieval literature, Sanskrit, and modern art. Because of the stock market crash in the United States and the start of the Great Depression, he found little opportunity for work. For the next five years he lived frugally in Woodstock, New York, and Carmel, California. In 1932–33 Campbell taught at the preparatory school he had attended as a boy, and in the next year he began teaching in New York City at the recently founded Sarah Lawrence College, where he eventually became a professor of literature. Upon his retirement from Sarah Lawrence in 1972, he and his wife, the respected choreographer Jean Erdman, moved to Honolulu. In the 1970s and ’80s Campbell became a popular figure on the lecture circuit. A six-part interview on public television with the American journalist Bill Moyers made him a household name in the United States. Lamentably, Campbell died before the interview was first broadcast in 1988.

While working on his first book, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944; coauthored with Henry Morton Robinson), Campbell attended the lectures of Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), a German Indologist at Columbia who had been forced into exile by the Nazis. Zimmer soon died, and Campbell devoted the next 12 years to turning Zimmer’s lecture notes into four tomes: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946), The King and the Corpse (1948), Philosophies of India (1951), and The Art of Indian Asia (1955). While formally only the editor of these works, Campbell was in fact almost a coauthor. It was from Zimmer, even more than from Jung—with whom Campbell is commonly linked—that Campbell took his comparative and symbolic approach to mythology.

Even before undertaking the editing of Zimmer, Campbell was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which remains his best-known work. In an approach that contrasted with that of subsequent books, Campbell tied the meaning of myth to its plot and claimed to have deciphered the common plot of all hero myths. He understood the hero myth’s central plot in Jungian terms, defining it as the male or female hero’s journey to a strange, new, divine world. The encounter with the divine occurs in adulthood rather than childhood, involves interaction with gods rather than with parents, and is loving rather than hostile. Understood psychologically, the journey symbolizes the rediscovery of the unconscious, from which an adult has lost contact in the process of growing up. Although revealing Jung’s influence, Campbell broke with Jung in espousing a fusion of consciousness and unconsciousness, humanity and divinity—an interpretation that reflected the influence of Zimmer.

Although regularly labeled a Jungian, Campbell differed from the Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst in many ways. He analyzed the personality in largely Jungian terms but rejected the balance Jung saw between the conscious and unconscious mind. Jung regarded myth as a useful part of therapy because it was a way for the conscious mind to uncover unconscious meaning and apply it to everyday life. For Campbell, myth provides sufficient access to the unconscious, and to have a myth is to need no therapy. Campbell advocated myth as a panacea for not only psychological woes but also social woes, and he attributed almost all human problems to the absence of myth. Campbell also saw himself as both a psychologist and a philosopher, whereas Jung saw himself as a psychologist alone. Rather than confine his subject matter to myth and the human mind, Campbell found in myth the key to the cosmos as a whole.

In his four-volume survey of world mythology, The Masks of God (1959–68), Campbell revealed a wide range of influences in addition to Jung and Freud, including the ethologistsNikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. Concerned with demonstrating the similarities between myths—the hero with a thousand faces, the god with many masks—he attributed the similarities sometimes to independent invention by each culture and sometimes to diffusion from a single culture. Thus his theory of myth fluctuated through the survey. Sometimes he favoured the East over the West, primitives over moderns, and planters over hunters. However, in the final volume, which he devoted to Western mythology from the mid-12th century to the present, he scorned primitives, planters, and the East and celebrated a self-reliant, heroic individualism that he believed was epitomized by the United States. He no longer asserted the mystical oneness of all persons and peoples but instead advocated the triumph of individuals—and their triumph in the human, not the divine, world. To some critics, Campbell, whose politics were unabashedly conservative, sounded like a Cold Warrior. He was a staunch supporter of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War and, ironically, an equally staunch opponent of the counterculture movement, which took his Hero as its inspiration.

In his other major work, the unfinished Historical Atlas of World Mythology (1983–87), Campbell discussed diffusion and independent invention as sources of similarities between myths and elaborately traced the routes by which diffusion took place. In the best-selling The Power of Myth (1988), the book form of his interview with Moyers, Campbell summed up his lifelong advocacy of myth as decisive for a happy life. Returning to the theme of the unity of myths originally enunciated in Hero, he claimed to find that unity not merely in the similarities between the traditional myths of the world but also in the newest source of myths: space travel. Seen from outer space, the Earth seems one.